by Tom Wolfe
They had just hanged themselves.
He looked at Mary Cary, and she was already staring at him. The same dawn was breaking over her. Her over-made-up eyes were open wide, her too-big lips were parted slightly, and a wondering, halfquestioning smile was beginning to form on her big, broad face.
That’s it, isn’t it? They’ve just hanged themselves?
Oh, that they had! They’d just confessed the actual motive: homophobia. They’d just established the fact that the killing began with an unprovoked, blind-sided assault. And they’d revealed the fact that there existed an as-yet-unidentified witness to the beginning of the attack.
Irv’s mind raced on ahead. A victory for justice—oh yes! But it would be a lot more than that.
Long after the three young rednecks had departed the DMZ and the live field feed was finished, Irv remained there in the cubicle and insisted that Mary Cary review the tape with him, over and over. He was soaring. He called Ferretti, down in Fayetteville, and he went over it with him, the same things, like a hero exulting after a battle.
The nice thing was that Mary Cary seemed almost as euphoric as he was. Perhaps she could already see how terrific this was going to make her look on Day & Night. Perhaps she could see herself depicted as the heroine who broke the Fort Bragg gay-bashing case, which was not inconceivable. But for the moment he didn’t even care. At this moment hers was the only face he could look into and see the reflection of his triumph.
“One of the beautiful parts,” she was saying, “is when the sort of rangy-looking one—Ziggy, is it?—when he wakes up, and he’s just a boy, I guess, and he sees the two gays on the roof, and he wakes up his father, and his father says, ‘Boys, them’s faggots,’ and he threatens to shoot them with budshot. Speaking of which, whatta you suppose budshot is?”
“Birdshot,” said Irv. “After you listen to these characters for two or three nights, something very bad happens to your brain and you actually begin understanding what they’re saying.” He was feeling so good, he didn’t even mean it as a rebuke for her reluctance, up until now, to take part in the two and a half weeks of surveillance. “A bud is a bird, a bub is a bulb, a bum is a bomb, a far is a fire, a tar is a tire, an earl is an aerial—I mean, I’ve been sitting here for two and a half weeks. I could write you a lexicological introduction to Florida Panhandle illiteracy.”
“Well, thank God you know what they’re saying!” said Mary Cary. Irv liked that. “But anyway,” she continued, “I think that whole business of the father saying they’re faggots and he’s gonna shoot the faggots—I think that’s a very important part of what we’ve got here, because it shows how homophobia is implanted, father to son, one generation to another. I mean, it’s a straight line from that scene in a hotel room ten or fifteen years ago to the scene in the men’s room where Valentine is killed. An absolutely straight line, Q.E.D. There it is.”
Irv reflected for a moment. “You’re right, you’re right. It definitely makes the point. But I’m not sure how much of that stuff about the roof we can use, if any.”
“Why not?”
“Well, I mean it’s … it’s so gross. I’m not sure how much of it we can get on the air in a prime-time network show. But there’s something else. It puts anal intercourse in such a vulgar light. I mean, all this about one man lubricating—the thing is, you could make ordinary heterosexual intercourse sound disgusting, too, depending on who you let describe it. Hell, you could turn Romeo and Juliet into a couple of dogs in the park, if you really wanted to get graphic about it. And frankly, we’ve got a similar problem with the scene in the men’s room.”
“Whattaya mean?”
“I mean I don’t wanna be the one who broadcasts to 50 million people this homophobic maniac’s claim that Randy Valentine was committing fellatio in a men’s room. And all that stuff about a hole in a partition—eeeeyah, it’s not even relevant.”
“Not relevant?”
“What’s it got to do with whether or not one man is justified in killing another for no good reason?”
“Maybe it doesn’t have anything to do with it,” said Mary Cary, “but I don’t see how we can touch that tape. It’s probably evidence. It could end up evidence in a trial, in court.”
“It can still be evidence. But for Day & Night we edit it.”
“How, Irv? That’s the most crucial part of the whole tape!”
“That’s the beauty of having two cameras going,” said Irv.
He didn’t have to explain it to her. If you had just one camera, and it was on someone who was talking, and you tried to edit something out, you would get a blip, no matter how carefully you did it, because the person would have moved, if only ever so slightly, from the moment you cut the tape to the moment you spliced it again. With two cameras you could just switch from one angle to the other at the cut, and the viewer would never know anything had been left out. On newsmagazine shows like Day & Night, this was standard practice whenever you wanted to eliminate something that was awkward or inconvenient.
“Well, I suppose we can do it, technically,” said Mary Cary, “but I think we’d be asking for a whole lot of trouble.”
Irv merely smiled. The truth was, he wasn’t even worrying about the problem any longer. Something else she had said, a phrase she had used a moment ago—“evidence in a trial, in court”—had just begun to register. The very idea gave him a warm, rosy rush. If the tape became the centerpiece of a successful criminal prosecution, then everything would come out … the whole story of how he, Irv Durtscher, had broken the case … of how he, Irv Durtscher, and not the celebrated face on the screen, actually created Day & Night and ran it and was its mind and soul … of how he, Irv Durtscher, was the Sergei Eisenstein, the Federico Fellini of this new art form, this new moral weapon, television journalism … of how he, Irv Durtscher—
He, Irv Durtscher, let his eyes pan over the studio around him, over the now-glassy gray screens of the two monitors right in front of him and the screens of all the monitors on the wall of the control room just beyond the cubicle. These were his palettes in the new art, the monitor screens of the control rooms where the producers practiced their magic. And perhaps it would come to pass … Day & Night would become Irv Durtscher Presents … The titles, the theme music, and then the world-renowned face and roundish form of—
A sudden small stab of guilt … I, Irv Durtscher. He was letting himself get carried away by personal ambition … Mustn’t let that happen … But then he worked it out. He was not doing all this for Irv Durtscher, or at least not just for Irv Durtscher. He was doing it for a dream passed on to him by his father and mother, two little but fiercely idealistic people who had eked by with a glass-and-mirror shop in Brooklyn, who had sacrificed everything to send him off to Cornell, who had never had the means, the opportunity, to bring their dream of social justice alive. This piece on the martyrdom of Randy Valentine, a poor, harmless gay soldier at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, was part of the final battle, the battle to end America’s secret feudal order and her subtle but pernicious forms of serfdom. The hour was at hand. The day of the Cale Biggers, the General Huddlestones, and those who did their dirty work, the Jimmy Lowes and Ziggy Ziggefooses and Florys, the day of the WASPs and their wanna-be’s with their constricted version of “families” and “the natural order”—that day was in its dusk and fading fast, and a new dawn was coming, a dawn in which no authentic genius of the future would ever need hide behind a mask of whiteness or heterosexuality or WASPy names and good looks … or Merry Kerry Brokenberruh.
He looked her right in the face. She stared back at him with a certain … something in her eyes, something he’d never seen there before. It was as if it was suddenly dawning on her what this all meant and she was seeing him, Irv Durtscher, in an entirely new light. Their eyes engaged in what seemed like a blissful eternity. He somehow knew that now if he just—well, why didn’t he go ahead and try it? She was … she had just gotten married for the third time, but it was ludicrous …
The guy, Hugh Siebert, some eye surgeon, was solemn, pompous, pretentious, a stiff neck and a nonentity … Couldn’t last … Why didn’t he just reach forward and take her hand in his, and whatever happened … would just happen … Irv and Mary Cary … There was no one around to see them … He upped the voltage, stared into her eyes with the eyes of a victorious warrior. A confident, manly, and yet warm and inviting, even seductive, smile stole across his face.
And then he went ahead and did it.
He reached out and took her hand in his and let the current flow from him into her, let it surge up from his very loins, all the while pouring his victorious gaze into her eyes.
For a moment Mary Cary didn’t stir, except to bring her eyebrows together quizzically. Then she lowered her head and stared at his hand, which still held hers. She stared at it as if it were a Carolina anole, a tiny tree lizard, that had somehow made its way up twenty-odd stories in New York City and wrapped its little lizard self around her hand. She didn’t even deign to take her hand away. She just lifted her head, cocked it to one side, and gave him a look that said, “What the hell’s gotten into you?”
Pop. The bubble burst. The magic moment deflated. Sheepishly, oh so sheepishly, he took his hand away. He felt as repulsed and humiliated as he had ever felt in the eight years he had known this infuriating woman.
That did it. She had to go. From now on—if she actually thought her celebrated presence was the heart and soul of Day & Night—
Then his spirits sank all over again. The plain truth was, he needed her more than ever right now. This story, the Randy Valentine story, was far from over. In keeping with the newsmagazine format, somebody was going to have to execute the ambush. That was the term they used, the ambush. Somebody was going to have to confront the three violent redneck murderers on camera. Somebody was going to have to find them, surprise them on the base, on the street, wherever, and shove the incriminating evidence right in their faces, and stand there and take whatever they had to say—or do—while the cameras rolled. In his sinking heart, he, Irv Durtscher, knew he could never pull off an ambush like that, even if the network was dying to see him on camera. And yet it wouldn’t faze Mary Cary for a second. It wouldn’t worry her before, during, or after. She’d do an ambush, of anybody, anywhere, any time, in an instant, just like that, with gusto and without a moment’s fear or regret.
He looked away, out through the glass of the cubicle at the great bank of control-room monitors, which glowed and flared from feeds all over the world. The new palettes … the new art form … the new dawn … The very notions began to curdle in his mind.
He looked back at her. She was still staring at him, only now with a look of boredom. Or was she merely tired?
“Well, I guess that’s all we can do tonight,” he said. He sounded as if he had lost his last friend. Moreover, he knew he sounded that way.
I, Irv Durtscher … damn that woman! … Why was it that everything, even the grandest designs, boiled down at last, when all was said and done, to sex?
PART TWO
THE IMPORTANCE OF LOLA THONG
Ferretti, the field producer for the Fort Bragg gay-bashing piece, had been down in Fayetteville for weeks, and it seemed as though every time he called Irv in New York he had some new war story about Bragg Boulevard. Not only that, back in New York, Irv had spent untold hours monitoring the live field feed from the DMZ itself, which was a typical Bragg Boulevard topless joint. So what could be so surprising about Bragg Boulevard? He had had a picture of this garish, hellish nightmare alley in his mind long before he got here yesterday.
But actually being on Bragg Boulevard, as he was tonight—this had unnerved Irv Durtscher. Seriously. It had rattled him so, he wanted to talk to someone about it. Immediately. But how could he? The stakeout had already begun, and soon, all too soon, any minute perhaps, the ambush would be underway. And he, Irv Durtscher, the Costa-Gavras of television journalism, the Goya of the electronic palette, was supposed to be the maximum leader of this operation.
Once more he ran his eyes over everybody who was here inside the RV with him—the RV, the recreational vehicle, a term he, having lived all his life in New York City, had never heard of before yesterday, when Ferretti showed him this monster. They were all crammed into the RV’s rear compartment … Ferretti … Mary Cary … Mary Cary’s fat makeup woman … the two hulking technicians, Gordon and Roy … and Miss Lola Thong, the Thai-American topless dancer Ferretti had recruited … too many bodies in too tight a space … too much equipment … lit entirely by the Radiology Blue glow of a bank of monitor screens … so that Mary Cary’s famous shock of blond hair now looked a sickly aquamarine … Irv scanned his entire army, looking for emotional support and wondering if they could tell the maximum leader had the hoo-hahs.
From the outside, to anybody passing by on Bragg Boulevard or anybody turning in here to the DMZ’s parking lot, the RV was just an ordinary beige High Mojave touring van, a big boxy house-on-wheels. Nobody would even look twice (Ferretti had assured him), because Fort Bragg was a huge base with more than 136,700 soldiers, support personnel, and family members, a highly transient population that practically lived in RVs, trailers, and U-Haul-its. But if anybody had been able to look inside the van, that would have been a different story. Ferretti had had a partition installed two-thirds of the way back, with a concealed door; and the technicians, Gordon and Roy, had turned the hidden rear section, where they were now, into a spaghetti of wires, cables, monitor screens, headsets, and recording equipment that reminded Irv, morbidly, of Bone Zone, the notorious counterterrorist movie.
They were parked right behind the DMZ, which from the rear was a crude, one-story, cinder-block-and-concrete structure with a flat roof weighed down by air-conditioning compressors and rusting ducts. The three rednecks, Jimmy Lowe, Flory, and Ziggefoos, were inside the topless joint at this moment, drinking, as usual, and jabbering away in rural Romanian, as Mary Cary called it. Mary Cary was watching them on the two monitors that took the feeds from the cameras hidden inside the DMZ and listening to them over a headset that had the unfortunate effect of compressing her Blond Bombshell hair. Every now and then she took the headset off, and the fat girl, her makeup woman, fluffed up her hair and put some more powder on her forehead. Irv wondered if all the powder meant she was sweating. Other than that, Mary Cary didn’t show any sign of nervousness at all. She didn’t seem to have a nerve in her body. Look at what she was wearing!—one of her creamy white silk blouses, a short creamy white skirt, a Tiffany-blue cashmere jacket, and bone-white pumps with medium-high heels. For an ambush! The blouse was unbuttoned practically down to her breastbone. It was almost as provocative as the cocktail dress the topless dancer Lola Thong was wearing, which showed so much cleavage it was ridiculous. Irv, on the other hand, was wearing regular ambush gear: jeans, running shoes, and a Burberry trench coat. (The Daumier of the Digitized Era was unaware that if he, a short, bald, fat, fortyish little man with a freckled dome, a double chin, and bad posture, walked anywhere near Fort Bragg in the Burberry trench coat, he would be taken for a child molester; at best.)
Irv didn’t even want to look at the monitors anymore. The sight of the three young rednecks in that booth, probably no more than twenty yards from where he was right now, only jangled his nerves more … but his eyes kept straying to the monitors all the same. All three were wearing T-shirts, and even on these two small screens you could see the muscularity of their arms and the firmness of their necks and jaws and, above all, the way their ears stuck out. Their ears stuck out because the sides of their heads were shaved, and the way their heads were shaved—
Mary Cary took off her headset again, and Irv moved over beside her and said in a low voice, “So what are our three—our three skinheads talking about now?” Breezy and laid-back, and not nervous, he wanted to sound.
“Our three what?”
“Our three skinheads,” said Irv. “This whole place—I’ve figured out what it is.” He gestured, as if
to take in all of Bragg Boulevard, Fayetteville, Fort Bragg, Cumberland County, and Hoke County, the state of North Carolina, the entire South. “You wanna know what this place is? Skinhead country.”
“Oh, for goodness’ sake, Irv,” said Mary Cary. “Relax.”
“What he say about skinheads?” Whadee say’bout skeenheads? It was the stripper, Lola Thong, talking to Mary Cary. “They’re skinheads?” Dey’re skeenheads?
Mary Cary shot Irv a reproachful look, as if to say, “You and your nerves and your big mouth.”
Lola, offspring of an American father and a Thai mother, was a tall, slender creature with black hair and pale skin that appeared milky blue in the glow of the monitors. She had an exotic Asian look through the eyes and cheekbones, and a trace of a Thai accent, which turned the short i in skinhead to a long e. Skeenhead. But her diction and grammar, like her jumbo breast implants, were strictly Low Rent American. At the moment she was agitated, twisting about on her high heels, so that her prodigious head of teased black hair bobbed about.
“He don’t say nothing to me about skinheads,” she said, nodding toward Ferretti, who stood a couple of steps away, looking at the monitors.
Mary Cary said, “They’re not skinheads, Lola. I promise you. They’re in the U.S. Army. That’s the way they make them cut their hair. You know that.”
“Then why he say skinheads?” To Lola, Irv was not the maximum leader. He was merely he.
Mary Cary sighed and shot Irv another look. “He was only making a joke. Because they cut their hair so short.”
“That’s true,” said Irv, whispering, afraid that Lola would start making too much noise. “It was just a figure—I was just talking about their hair. They’re just kids. They’re Gls. I was just trying to be funny.”
Lola did not look terribly reassured.
And funny Irv Durtscher had not tried to be since he had first laid eyes on Bragg Boulevard after arriving from New York thirty hours ago. The boulevard, which was six lanes wide in some places, ran right through the eastern end of Fort Bragg. Right through it; you could see the barracks. You weren’t separated from them by a wall or a fence or anything else. The soldiers could keep cars at the barracks. And did they ever! They spent everything they had on cars. You could see them barreling along Bragg Boulevard, three, four, five to a vehicle. You knew they were soldiers because you could see their shaved heads, with just little mesas of hair on top, and their ears, which stuck out. Many were black, but more were white, and it was the white ones Irv feared. Skinheads were white.
